Specter of Reason

I fondly remember last Christmas Eve, when Jason Stanley said Ryle's view of propositions was "idiotic." We were nearing the end of a brisk yet short-lived correspondence, the bulk of which spanned about 30 emails over the preceding 48 hours. I was home in bed, alone and barely mobile, recovering from a herniated disc in my lower back. My wife had taken the kids to her family's house, leaving me glued to my computer, surprised and inspired by Jason's interest in my ideas. My view was (and is) that Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (S&W) profoundly misinterpret Ryle in their oft-referenced 2001 paper, "Knowing How." I am not alone in thinking this. The same point is made in a number of published papers, though in a variety of different ways. Still, I couldn't convince Jason that S&W misinterpret Ryle, and he couldn't convince me that they don't. At least we agreed on the distinction I had made between propositionalism and ...

Introduction In his introduction to Creativity, Cognition, and Knowledge: An Interaction ( 2002 ), the late Terry Dartnall challenges his fellow cognitive scientists to pay attention to Wittgenstein in order to understand the central role of creativity in human intelligence. I want to explain why I think he is right, and why I think just as much attention should be paid to Gilbert Ryle. The main issue is the relationship between rules and behavior, an issue which may seem simple, but which implicates our very conception of what it means to be a person. It is sometimes said that, whereas people are creative, computers can only do what they are programmed to do. The idea is that creativity cannot be wholly rule-based. Our intelligence cannot simply be a matter of following rules. However, the truth may be more complicated.  Contemporary wisdom has it that the right kinds of programs can lead to creative behavior. Take genetic algorithms. They involve controlled processes of r...

Last September, I defended Gilbert Ryle against Stanley and Williamson's "Knowing How" (2001). After reviewing Ryle, reading a good many papers on the topic, discussing some issues with a few professional philosophers (including an in-depth and spirited email exchange with Jason Stanley about how to interpret Ryle), I've come to the following conclusions, which I divide into two parts. The first addresses S&W's misrepresentation of Ryle. In the second, I develop extensive, original arguments against S&W's formulation of knowing-how as a species of knowing-that. 1.0) Stanley and Williamson (S&W) profoundly misinterpret Ryle. I stand by my original critique of the way they present Ryle's regress argument. Similar critiques are found in Hetherington (2006) and Sheiber (2003). Others (Noe 2005; Wiggins 2009) point out other ways in which S&W get Ryle wrong, though I do not think anyone has yet to identify the full extent to which S&W ...

[ In July and August, 2010, I made some significant revisions and deleted some questionable portions of this post. ] In " Knowing How " (2001), Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson (S&W) defend intellectualism against Gilbert Ryle. Their paper was selected by The Philosopher's Annual as one of the ten best papers of 2001. Yet, as I will argue, they profoundly misrepresent Ryle (and so fail to make a sound critique of his project). This suggests that there has been a widespread and severe misunderstanding of Ryle among academic philosophers. Despite the problems with their response to Ryle, S&W's formulation of knowledge-how as a species of knowledge-that is a stand-alone argument and invites criticism of its own. As I aim to show, a clarification of some relevant issues makes it difficult to fully accept their analysis. In section I, I present intellectualism. In section II, I correct S&W's misrepresentation of Ryle's argument against intell...